RIFT celebrates its first year by looking back... and looking beyond

We just killed Akylios last night, 11/11 hammerknell :)

Cleared just in time for the next new raid zone.

@edgecrusherO0 I agree with you edge, to a point. i like the graphics as always and the number of things to do is nice, but holy cow....the grind is horrible and my brother and i could not stand it after a week back.

One bright light was a single quest line that gave me a pair of decent pants, Blighted shadow garb, one piece of a 4 piece set, i thought, wow really nice, took me a week to work through the quests and i really enjoyed it...........until i saw what i needed to do to get the other three pieces, first grind the tokens, 200 plus plus 5k planarite, then, once i had that piece, grind nearly 300 more tokens and turn them in plus the armor piece i had previouisly bought, nearly 550 tokens and 5k planarite to get one piece, knowing you have two more that have the exact same requirements, figuring my time, it would take me 4 months to get all 4 pieces.

Now if you live 24/7 in this game i would bet a person that has no life could get all these in under a month, not so for the majority of us. What turned out as a pleasant suprise and a great weeks worth of adventure soon turned to ash in my mouth as i saw the mechanics go south. Pass.

Hey, i tried (laugh). This game is grind/raiding personified, good luck with that. The other ways to gain gear, seems they have gone the rout of korean mmo's, expecting people to play hellacious hours to grind for items to get gear, this includes the raids. Not sure what the devs are thinking, whatever it is it didnt work for us nor quite a few we were chatting with that were also retrying the game.

Passing again, reason, grindfest, no common sense for the rest of us. The argument that busybodies will have such as "well do you want things handed to you?" is irrelevent and has no place here. the proof is the quest that took a week and rewarded me, truly fantastic and then a huge letdown after it was done.

@Graill440 rpg's are grinbdy, on-line games are grindy, what made you think a mmo-rpg wouldn't be grindy?

@Graill440. Say it took an equal amount of time to get the other pieces of armour, you would have got your full armour set within a month. Then what? Nothing to do and some would complain about a lack of content outside of raiding. It sure is a fine line between work and reward and judging by what you say it is more work and less reward. I am all for an endgame that doesnt involve grouping raiding etc but without that, what do you have left? Crafting? I am yet to hear of a game that does endgame well without group content like raiding etc (if there are such games I would love to hear about them, seriously). I am all for a bit of grinding but its pointless implementing content for the sake of it if only a small percentage of people will play it.

I yesterday resubbed to rift and haven't had much chance to play yet so I don't know if I will regret it. So far I have only had time to rebuild my souls and try to get used to all the new skills on my UI (as changing from dps to healer) so heaven help the first pug i get to practice with :)

@NeverDeath

That's one of the great things about RIFT. And it seems like this past year has only been a warm-up for Trion. So hopefully we'll see them working on some really cool innovative features this year.

@(Unverified)

What was wrong with Warriors? I played the 7 day Trial and played a Reaver / Paladin / Paragon build to 18, so if I ever decide to try again, I may continue that class. But I'd just like to know.

Only problem I had was soul-crushingly slow killing with a Shield - 1h.

@Faction 3

they no longer do twice as much single target DPS as mages/rogues (still double or so of a cleric). Some see that as a problem.

@fallwind

Yeah because mages specced 38 points into pyromancer to do max warlock damage, clerics specced 38 points into shaman to do max ranged damage, and rogues specced 38 points marksman to do max melee damage, right?

Between this and sabdancer the devs took their sweet ass time making sure the game was actually fun to play before continuously pumping out bugged content.

Then turds like you perpetuate that it's good design.

@fallwind

I see having damage meters ingame is starting to infect players with WoW'itis thinking. Perhaps this is a good indicator that Trion should find in their list of inovations a way to throttle or remove the ability of having 3rd party addons measure performance. I think this add immeasurable enjoyness to already a good game.

@Utakata

Yeah because having no metrical support for why Akylios is still up is great while your entire guild wastes raid night after raid night because your mages can't break 1,000 DPS.............

That's stupid. DPS meters are good, they let you know how well you are doing and allow real analysis for raid leaders.

But if you want to walk into an instance, hit a button, and have loot drop from the ceiling, then maybe you are the one with WoW-itis.

@(Unverified)
I believe the point is that when you provide instant numerical collation, the numbers become the sole focus and the meta becomes more important than the actual game.